Wealthy Greens the new DLP

Seats with high concentrations of miners - especially of the fly-in, fly-out kind, such as Swan, Hasluck, Solomon, Herbert and Macarthur - look terminal already and Western Australia, with its booming mining economy, is starting to look like a wasteland for Labor, as it was in 1974-75.

This is food for thought for the union officials presumably trying to win new mining industry members by supporting a tax on mining jobs. There is indeed a place for these blokes on Labor's present front bench.

When we look at the investment and superannuation income by federal seats as they now stand after boundary changes, we see a broad range of vulnerable seats such as Melbourne Ports, Brisbane, Bennelong, Gilmore, Corangamite, Deakin, Robertson and Hindmarsh. Then there are the ultra-marginal ALP seats that have margins of less than 1 per cent, such as Macquarie, Dickson and Bass.

And if the 80 per cent preference flow figure falls below 70 per cent, Labor loses an extra percentage point of its national preferred vote.

Governments are won or lost on these sorts of margins.

The Greens vote is now moving former Labor voters across to the Liberals in the same way that the old Democratic Labor Party moved Catholics into the mainstream Liberal ranks 50 years ago.

The recent Newspoll indicates the same trend is afoot, although it is reasonable to expect that a higher regard by Greens for the Liberal leadership would accelerate this trend. Bear in mind, however, that this trend was already evident in 2007 when the Coalition was led by Howard, not really a totemic Greens figure for academic lefties, professional consultants or retired worm farmers.

So I'd expect it to continue to the election this year. It could improve considerably for the Coalition if a rolled-Green, inner-urban, professional republican such as Malcolm Turnbull were invited back into the tent as part of the Liberal leadership team. This is a pretty good test of how fair dinkum Abbott is about winning.

But you would be a braver man than me to predict what motivates Greens voters. At the moment, they comprise one in six Australian voters, totally disenchanted with the ALP leadership over the budget and the emissions trading scheme, but they don't particularly like Abbott either.

The point for all of us to remember is the Greens tend not to have studied maths or economics, but they didn't get rich by being stupid.

Look at some sample seats.

Melbourne: Labor was on 54.7 per cent in the category of two-candidate-preferred against the Greens, and an 8 per cent swing from Labor to the Greens, as we've seen in Newspoll, gives the seat to the Greens on about 53 per cent.